CHAPTER EIGHT
JULIUS
I head straight for Coach Campbell’s office when I leave the Hockey rink, fighting hard to keep every frustrated thought of mine inside until I’m standing in front of him.
I don’t bother sitting down opposite him, feeling satisfied when he gets straight to the point.
“Well done on making the team.”
“Thanks, Coach.”
“How did you find your team last year?”
“Well, we won a few games. We lost more.”
“Yes, but how did you find the team?”
Maybe he could tell I’ve been meaning to have this conversation about some of the guys on the team. “It could have been better,” I begin. “I did a lot of the heavy lifting.”
“You found that some of the players were lacking?”
“They brought me down.”
He watches his desk for a moment, before he says,“Did you try to motivate any of them to do better?”
“You either have it or you don’t,” I say quickly. It’s the truth my dad always instilled in me.
Coach sighs. “I want to know about something youmay not have. Do you have any self awareness?”
What the fuck?
First Kaylah, now him. But this is just not a question that’s relevant to me.
“I’m nothing without self awareness, Coach.”
“Really? Because you’re standing in front of me telling me that you had a poor team last year, and the only reason you won the games you won was because of you.”
“Are you going to tell me that’s not true?”
I try most of the time to remain humble, but it does end up getting to a point.
“And to make matters worse, you’re putting down the performance of others, but you never once had a conversation with anyone to motivate them, which, let’s face it, would have probably done wonders.”
If I believe you either have it or you don’t, there is no amount of conversation that could change that.
I try to explain this, starting with, “Coach—“ But his voice cuts in straight away.
“But you either have it or you don’t right?” he fires back at me.
“It’s the truth,” I double down.
Shaking his head, he’s silent for a moment.
After a while he says, “Seeing as we’re giving up the truth, you want to know why I made you Captain?
” I don’t give a response because I know he’s not looking for one from me.
“Yes, you’re one of the best. Because of that you were always going to have extreme relevancy on the team, but from the moment I met you I knew exactly what to expect from you.
Well, if I’m being honest, I had pretty low expectations and you didn’t even live up to them.
” He releases another sigh. “I knew you would be cocky, fine. I thought at first, you might see yourself as a one man team, but eventually you would look around you and realise that you’re not a fucking island.
You have team members who need you to actually talk to them and motivate them, because that’s what a good fucking Captain does.
Instead, you go out on that ice, and you’re fucking selfish, Hunner.
You’re watching out for yourself and yourself only on that fucking ice, and then you talk about how the team is bringing you down.
What, the team who might respect you for your ability but they don’t feel comfortable being around you, and they certainly don’t feel the unity that should come with being on a sports team?
” After a pause, he says, “The fact that you have a confused look on your face is exactly why I asked you about self awareness. Let me break it down for you. You were not a good Captain last year. I was a good Coach, but in order for success, everyone needs to play their part and they need to play it well. I know there are a lot of factors into why you might win or lose a game, but I need you to know that your performance as Captain didn’t help matters at all.
I also need you to know that while I saw you as a natural leader, part of the reason I made you Captain was because it was clear to me that you would be even less of a team player without it.
But now we’re here and my problem is still with you being a team player.
Those guys didn’t know you last year and I’m not going to have that for this year, too.
Not when it’s so important. So here’s how things are going to work.
You will be Captain, along with Kaylah. I see she’s similar to you in that she’s more reserved, but I’m gonna be honest, in just that one game, she showed me that she doesbelieve in team work.
I need you to believe in it too, so I’m giving you this one chance to show me that you do.
I want to see a united front between all my players by the time we get to half season and if I don’t, I will take you off as Captain midway through the season and you won’t get that opportunity from me again. ”
I replay his words in my mind, trying to work out how this conversation took such a turn.
But the possibility of him taking my title of Captain away from me is what I’m stuck on.
“You can’t be serious right now,” I say.
“Oh, I’m serious,” he says. “And another thing, I know you played between Centre and Defenseman last year. This year, you’re going to stick to being just Right Defenseman. Kaylah will be Centre.”
I’m starting to think this woman has been planted into my life as payback for all my wrongdoings.
“So I’m just being punished then?” I ask.
“Are you enjoying proving my point?”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Do I have no self awareness?
“Coach—“ I begin, not knowing how I plan to finish.
“Not everything is about you,” he says resolutely. “Lead your team, yes, but get to know them as well. If they’re not comfortable with you, you’re not doing a good job and I’ll have a problem with that.”
I’m all out of arguments at this point. I need to process this shit out of here.
“Whatever,” is all I say.
“I’ll take that as an agreement.”
It’s hardly an agreement from me, but I leave his office anyway, with only one plan of action coming to mind for when I get home. The home I share with her right after just seeing her at Hockey.
Walking through the door, I don’t dwell on that too much and instead jump straight to my plan.
“How does that make any sense?” I say aloud to myself as I stare at my phone screen in my hand.
The briefest mention of Kaylah being a Hockey player at her old university looks back at me, but that comes without a picture to accompany her accolades or…anything else about her. It looks out of place compared to everything else on the website.
This isn’t anything new because it’s what I found when I did my first brief search of her.
But now she’s suddenly in my life in different ways, it’s time to look into her more thoroughly and I don’t know what I was expecting to find exactly, but I thought it would be more than just a mention of her.
It’s really just a list of names for the Women’s Team they had Yanton University, but beyond the mention of her being Captain from September to December, there’s nothing else. It wouldn’t be so strange if every other player that’s listed doesn’t have a picture and short biography by their name.
I exit out of the website in the hopes of finding something else on the Internet that can tell me more about her, but it’s all just shit that has been derived from her name but has nothing to do with her.
Everyone’s different, but for a sportsperson as good as her, there’s usually some type of story or article that lives on the Internet about us.
I’ve seen it for and about m myself, people would have shit to say about that, especially when I know you don’t get that good unless you’ve been doing this forever.
There’s something really not making sense about the fact she’s looking like a ghost on the internet.
Who the fuck is this woman? Seriously. From what I can gather she’s in her second year like me, at Wildern, but why did she leave her other university?
She must have been getting comfortable there if she was on the Hockey team and the Captain, no less.
Transferring seems like a process you only do if you have to.
But even just the way she claimed her room before anyone else and stayed here for what I’m assuming was the whole summer, it’s got questions rising in my mind that I need to just put to rest. I mean, I came here early too and that’s because there’s something I’m avoiding. So what’s her excuse?
I sigh and get my phone out of my sight because this is pointless. Anything I find out about her isn’t going to solve the problem I have of not wanting her to be Captain with me.
Or worse, take over as Captain from me.
I can’t even sit still right now, and suddenly I’m grabbing my phone again. But this time I’m reading the new email that has just come through from Coach Campbell, sent to everyone on the new team.
Some names I recognise, most I don’t. Seeing Nathan and Daniel’s names reminds me I need to go make some food, preferably without them joining me in the kitchen for any type of conversation.
Yeah, that’s not a good way to prove Coach wrong.
Fuck.
The sigh out of my mouth comes naturally, before I put my ear against the wall for any noise.
Walking into the empty kitchen, the thought crosses my mind that I could do with some wings right now so I pull the pack out of the fridge and get everything else I need out.
It’s not even two minutes of me appreciating the silence in the kitchen before I hear, “Captain!”
Oh, yeah, because Coach included in his email the announcement of the co-captains.
And here comes Nathan here to shout about it.
“Or wait, is it co-captain?” he continues. “Is that a thing you can call someone or is it just Captain?”
“Bro, what you talking about? Of course you can call someone co-captain,” Daniel says.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t really make sense.”
“How does it not make sense?”
“Because it’s weird to call someone co-captain.”
“No, it’s not weird because that’s what they are.”
Between Kaylah and these two, I must have gone really wrong somewhere in life to deserve this.
“It doesn’t have the same ring to it as Captain,” Nathan says, sounding serious as fuck about it.
“It’s literally a two second word in front of it.”